By Annalisa Giust
Spring 2007 Kaplan Award Winner
They start you slowly with bones but this is still a morgue. Albeit a morgue with an interior decorator and lighting designer but still… I’m nervous. My hands are sweaty. The scapula is such a pretty bone one wonders, did we ever have the potential to develop wings?
I’m not even out of the first damn room and I feel sick.
There is a statement on the wall in the first room:
“the study of human anatomy has always operated on a basic principle: to see is to know…”
The “bone man” looks up accusingly as if to say “Why have you done this?”, or at least in my mind that’s what it looks like. They have put fake eyeballs in.
The colors of the walls are about the least offensive colors you can imagine, brownish plum, taupe, ecru or maybe eggshell I don’t know I always get the two confused, and the lighting? Well this is top quality art gallery lighting, subtle yet precise. The Plexiglas cases are every bit as thick as the ones in the museum covering rare centuries old porcelain.
This is some spectacular marketing.
I’m getting a headache from this.
I take a deep breath and move into the next room. Now I feel shaky. I scan the room trying not to see dead people and notice that there are about 50 live ones. Even though there is a seemingly respectful silence, the idea of a circus sideshow crosses my mind. Many people have brought tots in strollers. I wonder how much this is going to run in therapy bills twenty years down the road. The six-to-nine crowd seems the most intrigued and the many smeary nose prints on the glass about three and half or four feet off the ground are testament to their desire to get up close and personal.
I can’t quite bring myself to get too close to the cases yet. People stand in front of them and gaze at the different tissue layers; bones, tendons, muscles, veins and arteries; they then touch their own corresponding parts. I can see the value of all of this for scientific study and in a strange way from an artistic perspective, but as far as entertainment value? This is simply lost on me.
The “bone people”… They are beautiful and exposed and vulnerable.
I try to at least spend a bit of time actually looking at the bits and pieces in the cases; they are disembodied and therefore less intimidating. I am not normally this squeamish. When my son was two-and-a-half he almost completely severed the middle joint of his left index finger. In the emergency room I held him in my arms while the reconstructive surgeon sewed the nerve bundle and tendon back together before stitching the outer layer of my son’s finger. I didn’t take my eyes off of the procedure until it was over. Granted once the big puffy bandage and splint had encased that little two-and-a-half year old finger I went a bit woozy but I think that generally happens after a huge wash of adrenaline wears off. So why am I having such a hard time with this?
Ah, the “vessel room”. I keep feeling the need to apologize.
The blood vessel room is easier for me to take. It is abstract and surreal. Electric red, shocking blue, and incandescent white surrounded by the almost invisible dark plum brown walls. It is extraordinary. I am fascinated and captivated by the miles and miles of veins and arteries floating in liquid that resemble nothing so much as complex delicate seaweed. The lighting and the arrangement of the exhibits in this room are sleek. The vessels within vessels are spotlighted individually and arranged with obsessive precision; it reminds me of some uber-modern art galleries I have been in. I spend more time in here than I have in the first two rooms. I’m afraid of what’s around the next corner.
“Why am I here?” is stamping its feet and screaming in my mind. Since this exhibit arrived in Seattle I have refused to go. I’m here now because, well, I’m in school; and this is an assignment. An assignment that I turned into two assignments.
My art professor sees this as an extraordinary opportunity to view, up close and personal, the underlying human structure in a way never before possible. My journalism professor sees this as a good topic for my foray into narrative journalism. So I walk through these temporary rooms looking at, what is now for these “specimens”, a permanent condition.
I marvel at the prowess of Premier Exhibitions Incorporated (PEI) to sell dead bodies to the public. The thought “It’s kind of like vying for a front row seat at a four car pile up” saunters through my head.
The difference between PEI’s, “BODIES… The Exhibit” and their competitor, Gunther von Hagen’s, (the German anatomist who originally developed the plastination process to preserve these specimens) “Body Worlds” exhibits is this: von Hagen’s website explicitly states that the bodies used in his exhibit are from “donors who gave informed consent.” The bodies in the PEI exhibit are “legally obtained” from China. According to Dr. Roy Glover, spokesman for BODIES… The Exhibition in an NPR interview, “They’re unclaimed,” Glover says. “We don’t hide from it, we address it right up front.”
I cling to my notebook like some sad little shield.
As I leave the vessel room I find myself in front of a sign telling me that there are fetuses in the next room. If I do not wish to view them I can walk through the door to my right. “Are you kidding me?” Ah, irony. I walk into the fetus room and am confronted with the results of miscarriages or stillbirths. A placard assured visitors that none of these specimens is the result of an abortion. Ah, more irony. I don’t spend much time in here but I’m not as bothered by these specimens.
Back to the grown-ups. The first of only three women in the exhibit is in the next room and is the first of any of the specimens not to be skinned (sorry I don’t know how else to put it). She still has her layer of fat under the skin. She looks heavy in comparison to all the men in the the exhibit who’ve had their skin and fat removed. Oh, and she has been cross sectioned vertically front to back and her face is sliced off. I have a difficult time looking at this body, The three females have more skin left on than their male counterparts. This make them seem more exposed rather than less.
I want out of here, now.
I finally near the exit and am confronted by a gift shop… A gift shop? What in the hell? I was previously unaware that this level of tacky existed. We might as well give out party favors at a funeral.
I’m done. I can’t get out the door fast enough. I suck in the chilled moist downtown air. I am pissed off. It’s not even noon but at the moment a two drink lunch sounds like the best idea I’ve ever had.
I’m not sure what to make of everything I am feeling right now. This is going to have to marinate for a few days…
I have had several conversations since my visit to the exhibit. The consensus is that the exhibit was worth seeing and that many of my friends found it fascinating, cool, slightly creepy, educational; some of them seem bothered about the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the bodies, but not to the extent that I am. My boyfriend takes such a clinical view of the whole thing as an educational marvel that he fails to grasp exactly what it is that’s bothering me. At times so do I.
A few days later, still bothered by the whole experience, the question that has been lurking around at the edges of my brain finally stepped out and presented itself. “Would I be any more bothered if the bodies in the exhibit had been people I knew but didn’t know they had given their informed consent than I was knowing these complete strangers hadn’t even had that option?”
My answer is no.